Bourne

A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit my parents in AZ. I watched The Bourne Supremacy with my dad. I wasn't exactly excited to watch it, because I remembered hating the swishy-swish-pan shit in the theater. But my dad hadn't seen and and he was opening wine bottles so... what the hell.

Long/short -- I loved it. I'm not sure why but, on a smaller screen, the fast-cutting and active camera didn't bother me. I liked the energy. I could track what was going on in the scene. It was a vastly entertaining movie. And we have my man Karl Urban being a badass. Good stuff.

I thought... maybe I was able to track the scenes because I'd seen the movie before. I thought, when I see Ultimatum, it'll probably bug me the first time I watch it, and then be fine on DVD.

This past weekend I was deep in the woodshed. I worked my ass off. But you can't stay in too long, or else you lose perspective. On Sunday, I crawled out of the hole, eyes blinking in the sunlight... and promptly slithered into a big, dark room -- the Arclight Dome -- to catch The Bourne Ultimatum.

The swishy-cutty stuff is still there. But it didn't bother me at all. Is it because Paul Greengrass got better, or pulled back a bit? Is it because I'd made peace with Supremacy?

It doesn't matter. This movie blew me the fuck away. LOVED IT.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I honestly think we can thank the Bourne movies for bringing back the kickass American action film. For a while, American action sucked ass. It was slow and ponderous and bloated. There are always a few brights spots in any era -- I'm thinking of Ronin -- but man, the Die-Hard-in-a-tool-shed years were bleak.

It seemed even worse when I started watching Hong Kong movies in the early '90s. I'd watch stuff like The Killer and Once Upon a Time in China, and the American stuff just seemed ridiculous by comparison.

The town looked to Hong Kong, with mixed results... it seemed like H'wood didn't quite understand what they were seeing, or why it was working. Except for a few guys like Tarantino, it was mostly a bunch of clumsy, clueless, watered-down garbage.

But these Bourne flicks, simply by being awesome, have brought up the game across the board. This is a three-disc set I shall own. They're deeply influential, and prove you don't have to turn off your brain to deliver a solid action movie.